Is Your Business Required to Lodge a TPAR in 2026?

If your business pays contractors, your Taxable Payments Annual Report (TPAR) is due on Friday 28 August 2026. Two things are different about TPAR 2026: contractor payments now pre-fill into individual tax returns, and the ATO has publicly warned it expects more than $1 billion in TPAR income to go unreported.

What Has Changed for TPAR 2026

The TPAR obligation itself has not changed. What has changed is what the ATO now does with the data, and that shift matters for both sides of the transaction.

Contractor payments now pre-fill into tax returns

For Tax Time 2026, approximately $21 billion in payments reported through TPARs will appear automatically as pre-filled income in eligible tax returns, covering around 700,000 sole traders and individuals in business. Data that businesses have been reporting for years is now visible to the contractor — and to the ATO — inside the return itself.

The ATO has put a number on the gap

The ATO estimates more than $1 billion in TPAR payments could be omitted or under-reported this year. ATO Assistant Commissioner Tony Goding has been direct about it, warning that “leaving income out of your tax return doesn’t make it invisible to the ATO”.

A reminder if you have not lodged since 2024–25

Paper TPAR lodgment was permanently discontinued from 28 August 2025. This is not new for 2026, but it still catches businesses that lodge infrequently. You will need to lodge through Online services for business, Online services for individuals and sole traders, Standard Business Reporting-enabled software, or your registered tax agent.

Does Your Business Actually Have to Lodge?

You need to lodge a TPAR if you have an ABN, you pay contractors or subcontractors to provide services on your behalf, and your business operates in one of the reportable industries. Contractors can be sole traders, partnerships, companies or trusts. Payments for private or domestic work unrelated to your business do not count.

The threshold is not the same across industries

This is where businesses most often get it wrong. Two different tests apply, depending on the service.

Building and construction: you are treated as being in the industry if any one of three limbs is met — 50% or more of your business income this financial year is from building and construction services, or 50% or more of your business activity this financial year relates to those services, or 50% or more of your business income in the previous financial year was from those services. That third limb is the one businesses miss.

Cleaning, courier and road freight, IT, and security services: a lower 10% test applies. If payments you receive for those services make up 10% or more of your current or projected GST turnover, you are in scope.

The 10% threshold catches a lot of businesses that do not think of themselves as being “in” one of these industries at all — a property manager arranging cleaning, a retailer running its own delivery fleet, a professional firm with a meaningful IT services line.

For those four industries, reassess every year. Lodging last year does not mean you must lodge this year, and skipping last year does not mean you can skip this one. Building and construction works differently because of the prior-year limb: if you lodged last year on the income test, you are in scope again this year regardless of your current-year mix.

If you don’t need to lodge, say so

If you have lodged a TPAR previously but no longer meet the test, submit a non-lodgment advice form. Without it, the ATO’s system continues to expect a report from you, and silence reads as a missed lodgment rather than a considered position.

What You Need to Report

For each contractor you paid during 2025–26, you will need:

• Their ABN, where you hold one
• Their name and business name
• Their address
• The gross amount you paid for the year, including GST and any tax withheld
• The total GST included in those payments
• The total tax withheld where the contractor did not quote an ABN

All of this should come off your invoices. If your contractor records are incomplete — missing ABNs are the usual culprit — that is worth resolving now rather than in the last week of August, because chasing details from a contractor you no longer engage is slow work.

If You Are the Contractor: Do Not Lodge Before 28 August

This is the half of the TPAR story that gets almost no attention, and this year it matters more than it ever has.

If you are a sole trader or contractor who receives payments that will be reported through a TPAR, the ATO is advising you to wait until after 28 August before lodging your own return. TPAR data does not finish flowing into pre-fill until businesses have lodged, and pre-fill is only complete once that deadline has passed.

One caution worth stating plainly: pre-fill is a cross-check, not a substitute for your own records. It captures payments reported through the TPAR system, which will not always be every dollar of your business income. You remain responsible for declaring all of it, whether it appears in pre-fill or not.

What Missing the Deadline Costs

Failure to lodge on time penalties apply to the TPAR as they do to other lodgments, and they became more expensive this year. The Commonwealth penalty unit rose from $330 to $364 on 1 July 2026, and because the TPAR falls due after that date, the higher rate applies for the whole period it is outstanding.

For a small entity, the penalty accrues at one penalty unit for each 28-day period the report is late, capped at five units — a maximum of $1,820 per report. Medium and large entities face multiples of that base amount. It is a meaningful cost for a lodgment that, with organised records, takes very little time.

The Question Your TPAR Data Should Prompt

Preparing a TPAR forces you to assemble a complete schedule of what you paid every contractor over the year. That schedule is useful well beyond the lodgment itself, because it answers a question a lot of businesses avoid asking.

Payments to contractors can be caught by the NSW payroll tax contractor provisions, even where the working relationship is genuinely one of contract rather than employment. The Uber payroll tax decision was a reminder of how broadly those provisions can reach. Classification also drives superannuation, and with payday super now in force, getting it wrong is a faster and more expensive problem than it used to be.

If the total on your TPAR is larger than you expected, that is worth a conversation before the next reporting cycle rather than after an audit.